The present invention relates generally to local area networks, and more specifically to a local area network having a star topology.
A known star topology local area network is made up of a plurality of user terminals which are distributed in a star topology and connected through user access lines to the common data bus of a network node. The network requires that the transmission speed of data on the data bus be equal to the transmission speed of data on the user access lines. If the network needs to serve many user terminals with high throughput capability the speed of the bus must be increased. This, however, requires the user terminals to increase their operating speeds commensurate with the high transmission speed of the data bus. This results in an increase in cost of the user terminals. Since the prior art local area network employs a collision detection technique for accessing the common data bus, the probability of data collision increases with traffic, and hence the system throughput is limited.